“It seems a fine place to call home.”
“It is.”
Yusuf stepped to the edge of the tower after another minute or two, looked down, then turned to Ezio again. “Race you to the bottom?” he asked, and, without waiting for a reply, threw himself from the parapet in an astounding Leap of Faith.
Ezio watched him plummet, like a hawk stooping, and land safely in a hay wain he’d already singled out, 175 feet below. He sighed, pausing a moment longer to stare at the city spread out beneath him, in wonder. The Great City. The First City. The heiress of Ancient Rome. Constantinople was a thousand years old and had been home to hundreds of thousands of citizens at a time, in the not-too-distant past, when Rome and Florence were mere villages by comparison. She had been plundered and ravaged, and he knew the legendary beauty of the past was gone forever; but she had always awed her attackers and those who sought to reduce her; and, as Yusuf had said, she had never truly been subdued.
Ezio looked around one last time, scanning the whole horizon with his keen eyes. He fought down the deep sadness that filled his heart.
Then, in turn, he made his own Leap of Faith.
TWENTY
The following morning, Ezio and Yusuf sat in the courtyard of the Assassin headquarters, poring over plans spread on a table, charting their next move. There was no doubt in their minds that couriers from the Templars at Masyaf would very soon arrive in the city, if they had not done so already, and that a concerted Templar attack must be anticipated.
“It’s like a hydra, the Templar organization.” Ezio brooded. “Cut one head off, and two grow back.”
“Not in Rome, Mentor. You’ve seen to that.”
Ezio was silent. With his thumb, he tried the edge of the hookblade he was oiling. “I am certainly impressed by this weapon, Yusuf. My brothers in Rome would profit from having them as part of their equipment.”
“It’s not a hard design to copy,” Yusuf replied. “Just give credit where it’s due.”
“I need more practice,” Ezio said, little realizing that he’d get it, soon enough, for at the moment, the street door burst open before Azize had time to reach it, and Kasim, one of Yusuf’s lieutenants, rushed in, his eyes wild.
“Yusuf bey -come quickly!”
Yusuf was on his feet in an instant. “What’s going on?”
“An attack on two fronts! Our Dens in Galata and at the Grand Bazaar.”
“It never stops,” Yusuf said, angrily. “Every day, the same bad news.” He turned to Ezio. “Could this be the big attack you fear?”
“I have no way of knowing, but it must be dealt with.”
“Of course. How is your appetite for swordplay?”
“I think you know the answer to that. I do what I must.”
“Good man! It’s time to put your hookblade to some real use! Let’s go!”
TWENTY-ONE
In no time at all, they were sprinting across the rooftops in the direction of the Galata Den. As they grew close, they descended to the street in order to be less conspicuous to Byzantine crossbowmen. But they found their way blocked by a unit of heavily armed mercenaries, who ordered them, menacingly, to turn back. They pretended to retreat a few paces, conferring together.
“Use your hookblade, Mentor,” said Yusuf. “There’s a sure way to get past these thugs with the maximum of speed and the minimum of fuss.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Watch. We call it a hook-and-roll.”
Without more ado, Yusuf turned back to the line of men spread out across the street, facing them. He selected one and ran toward him at such great speed that, before the man or any of his companions could react, he leapt into the air immediately in front of his target, projecting his body forward with his hookblade unleashed and his right arm plunging down, ready to stick the hook in the back of the man’s belt. Following through, Yusuf did a somersault over the man, releasing his blade as he did so, and carried on at speed away from the dumfounded mercenaries. Before they had time fully to regroup, Ezio followed Yusuf’s lead, managing as he somersaulted over his man to grab him by the neck and wrestle him to the ground, landed some feet behind him, and ran on to join his companion.
But there were more guards ahead to deal with, and in doing so, Ezio picked up another technique from his Seljuk friend. This time, Yusuf swung the hook low, stooping as he approached his target, and wrapped his weapon round one of his opponent’s ankles, felling him as he swept past. Once again, Ezio copied the moves, and had soon caught up with the leader of the Istanbul Assassins.
“And that’s what we call a hook-and-run.” Yusuf grinned. “But I can see you’re a natural. Excellent work.”
“I almost stumbled back there. Need to improve.”
“You’ll get plenty of practice.”
“Look out, here come more of them!”
They were at the intersection of four streets, empty now that the fighting had caused the ordinary citizens to flee inside the buildings and shut the doors behind them. But they were cornered-large units of Byzantines were thundering toward them from each quarter.
“What now?” said Ezio, drawing his sword and releasing his left-hand hidden-blade.
“Put those away, Mentor. When he tires of running, an Assassin around here takes to the air.”
Ezio quickly followed Yusuf as he scaled the nearest wall, using his hook to aid him, with increasing skill. Once on the rooftops again, Ezio noticed that, in this area, many were topped with stout vertical wooden posts, from which tarred ropes, stretched taut, led upward and downward to other posts on other rooftops, connected by a series of pulleys and blocks and tackle. Such a post stood on their roof, next to where they were standing.
“We introduced this system to transport goods about, from warehouse to warehouse, from warehouse to shop,” explained Yusuf. “You can find it in various districts all over the city. It’s a lot quicker than using the streets, which are too narrow and usually crowded. And it’s a lot quicker for us, too.”
Ezio looked down below, to where the Byzantines were trying to break into the building which they were standing on. Too heavily armored to climb, they’d decided to come at them from the interior.
“We’d better hurry.”
“You use your hookblade for this, too,” said Yusuf. “Just hook it to a rope, hang on tight, and let go-of course, it only works downhill!”
“I’m beginning to see why you developed this weapon-it’s perfect for Constantinople.”
“You can say that again.” Yusuf cast a glance down to the street below in his turn. “But you’re right-we must make haste.” Briefly, he scanned the surrounding rooftops. About three hundred feet away, on the roof of a building downhill from where they were, he spotted a Byzantine scout, his back to them, keeping a lookout over the city, which spread itself below him.
“See that guy?” Yusuf said.
“Yes.”
“And there’s another, just over there, to the left-on a connecting roof.”
“Got him.”
“We’re going to take them out.” Yusuf extended his hookblade and notched it over the rope. He raised a warning hand as Ezio was about to do the same. “Do not follow me immediately. Allow me to show you.”
“I am glad to learn the customs of the country.”
“We call this a zipline. Watch!”
Yusuf waited until the second scout was looking in another direction, then let the rope take his weight. It strained slightly, but held. Then he swung his body clear, and in a moment he was sailing silently down the rope toward the unsuspecting first scout. At the last moment, he unhooked his blade and dropped the last few feet onto his target, swinging the blade round to slice into the man’s side. He caught the scout’s falling body and lowered it gently to the ground before stepping quickly behind the cover of a small outbuilding on the roof. From there, he let out a strangled cry.
This alerted the second scout, who turned quickly to look in the direction from which the
sound had come.
“Help, comrade! Assassins!” Yusuf called, using Greek, in an anguished voice.
“Stand fast! I’m coming!” the second scout called back, racing across the roof to the aid of his fellow.
At that moment, Yusuf beckoned to Ezio, who rocketed down the rope in his turn, in time to drop fatally onto the second scout, by that time kneeling next to the body of his fallen companion.
Yusuf joined him by the two bodies. “You didn’t even break a sweat,” Yusuf said, chuckling. Then he immediately became serious, and continued, “I can see you can look after yourself, so I think it’s time we split up. I’d better head to the Bazaar and see what’s happening at our Den there. You go on to Galata, to help them there.”
“Tell me the way.”
Yusuf pointed across the rooftops. “You see the tower?”
“Yes.”
“The Den’s right by it. I can’t be in two places at once, but now you’re here, I don’t have to be. Thank Allah you came, Mentor. Without your help…”
“You’ve done all right so far.”
Yusuf took his hand. “ Haydi rastgele -Ezio. Good luck!”
“Good luck to you, too.”
Yusuf turned south while Ezio ran over the russet-colored tiles of the rooftops until he found another rope system. Sailing quickly and unopposed from holding post to holding post, and traveling a lot faster than he would have done on foot, he quickly made his way downward toward the tower’s base, and his next battle.
TWENTY-TWO
Ezio arrived during a lull in the fighting and managed to slip into the Den without being seen. There, he was greeted by Dogan, one of the Assassin lieutenants he had briefly met earlier.
“Mentor, it is an honor. Is Yusuf not with you?”
“No-they’ve mounted another attack-on our Den by the Grand Bazaar. He’s on his way there now.” Ezio paused. “What is the situation here?”
Dogan wiped his brow. “We’ve beaten back the vanguard, but they’re just fallen back to wait for reinforcements.”
“Are your men ready for them?”
Dogan gave Ezio a wry smile, encouraged by the Mentor’s enthusiasm and confidence. “Now you’re here, they are!”
“Where’s the next attack likely to come from?”
“The north side. They think that’s the weakest.”
“Then we’d better make sure it’s the strongest!”
Dogan redeployed his Assassins according to Ezio’s instructions, and by the time the Templars launched their counterattack, they were ready for them. The fight was as fierce as it was short, leaving fifteen Templar mercenaries dead in the square near the tower where the Den was located. The Assassin troop counted two men and one woman wounded, but no fatalities. It had been a rout of the Templars.
“They will not be back soon,” Dogan told Ezio when it was all over.
“Let’s hope so. From my experience of the Templars, they do not like to be bested.”
“Well, if they try it again around here, they’ll have to learn to live with it.”
Ezio smiled and clapped Dogan on the shoulder. “That’s the kind of talk I like to hear!”
He made to take his leave.
“Where will you go now?” asked Dogan.
“I’m going to join Yusuf at the Den of the Grand Bazaar. Send word to me there if the Templars do regroup.”
“In that unlikely event, you will be the first to know.”
“And tend to your wounded. That sergeant of yours took a bad cut to the head.”
“It is being attended to as we speak.”
“Can I get there by using the zipline system?”
“Once you reach the south bank of the Horn. But you must cross that by ferry. It’s the fastest way to the peninsula.”
“Ferry?”
“There was to have been a bridge, but for some reason it was never built.”
“Ah yes,” said Ezio. “I remember somebody mentioning that.” He put out his hand. “Allaha ismarladik,” he said.
“Gule gule.” Dogan smiled back.
The Den Ezio needed to reach was located not far from the Bazaar, in the Imperial District, between the Bazaar itself and the ancient church of Haghia Sofia, now converted by the Ottomans into a mosque.
But the fighting Ezio reached was taking place a short distance to the southwest, close to the docks on the southern shores of the city. He stood for a moment on a rooftop, observing the battle, which was in full spate in the streets and on the quays below him. A rope from a wooden stake near him stretched down to a point near where he could see Yusuf, his back to the waters of the dock, in the thick of the fray. Yusuf was fending off a half dozen burly mercenaries, and his companions were too busy themselves to come to his aid. Ezio hooked onto the rope and swooped down, jumping from the rope at a height of twelve feet and spread-eagling himself, left-hand hidden-blade extended, to land on the backs of two of Yusuf’s attackers, sending them sprawling. They were dead before they could react, and Ezio stood over them as the remaining four in their group turned to face him, giving Yusuf enough respite to edge round to their flank. Ezio kept his hookblade extended.
As the four Templar troopers fell roaring on Ezio, Yusuf rushed them from the side, his own hidden-blade brought quickly into play. One huge soldier was almost upon Ezio, having backed him up against a warehouse wall, when he remembered the hook-and-roll technique and used it to escape from, and fell, his opponent, stabbing the man’s writhing body with his hidden-blade to deliver the coup de grace. Meanwhile, Yusuf had dispatched two of the others, while the survivor took to his heels.
Elsewhere, fierce fighting was simmering down as Yusuf’s brigade got the better of the Templars, who finally fled, cursing, into the depths of the city to the north.
“Glad you arrived in time to meet my new playmates,” said Yusuf, wiping and sheathing his sword, and retracting his hidden-blade, as Ezio did likewise. “You fought like a tiger, my friend, like a man late for his own-wedding.”
“Do you not mean funeral?”
“You would not mind being late for that.”
“Well, if we’re talking about a wedding, I’m twenty-five years late already.” Ezio pushed the familiar darkening mood aside and squared his shoulders. “Did I arrive in time to save the Bazaar Den?”
Yusuf shrugged regretfully. “Alas, no. We’ve only managed to save our own skins. The Bazaar Den is taken. Unfortunately, I arrived too late to regain it. They were too well entrenched.”
“Don’t despair. The Galata Den is safe. The Assassins we used there can join us here.”
Yusuf brightened. “With my ‘army’ doubled in size, we’ll take the Bazaar back together! Come! This way!”
TWENTY-THREE
They made their way through the market streets and the massive, glittering maze of the souk itself, the splendid, frenetic, gold-and-red Grand Bazaar, with its myriad lanes of little shops selling everything from scents to spices to sheepskins to costly Persian carpets from Isfahan and Kabul, cedarwood furniture, swords and armor, brass and silver coffeepots with snaking spouts and elongated necks, tulip-shaped glasses for tea and larger, slender ones for sharbat -a cornucopia selling everything in the world a man could imagine or desire, amid a babel of traders’ voices raised in at least a dozen different languages.
Once they’d passed out of the northeastern side, they came to streets nearer the Den. Here, the Templar presence was strong. The buildings were hung with their banners, and the merchants who did business there, Ezio could see, were not infrequently being harassed or otherwise bullied by Byzantine toughs.
“As you can see,” Yusuf was telling him, “when the Templars take over a district, they like to flaunt it. It’s a constant battle to keep them at bay; they like nothing better than to rub our noses in every victory they enjoy.”
“But why does the sultan do nothing? This is his city!”
“Sultan Bayezid is far away. There aren’t enough Ottoman resources for the gover
nor here to keep matters in check. If it weren’t for us. ..” Yusuf trailed off, then continued, following another train of thought. “The sultan is at war with his son, Selim, many leagues northwest of the city. He’s been away for years, at least since the great earthquake in 1509, and even before that he was almost always absent. He is blind to all this turmoil.”
“The earthquake?” Ezio remembered news of that reaching Rome. Over a hundred mosques had been reduced to rubble, along with a thousand other buildings, and ten thousand citizens had lost their lives.
“You should have seen it. We called it the Lesser Day of Judgment. The huge waves it caused in the Sea of Marmara almost brought down the southern walls. But the sultan’s eyes remained closed, even to that warning.”
“Ah, but your eyes are open, si?”
“Like two full moons. Believe me.”
They had reached a large open karesi, thronged with Templar mercenaries, who began to eye them suspiciously as they crossed the square.
“Too many to engage directly,” Yusuf said. “We’d better use one of these.”
He delved into the pouch at his side and produced a bomb.
“What’s that-a smoke bomb?” Ezio said. “Hmn. I’m not confident that that will help us here.”
Yusuf laughed. “Smoke bomb? Dear Ezio-Mentor-it’s really high time you Italians joined the sixteenth century. These bombs do not obscure-they distract. Watch.”
Ezio stood back as Yusuf threw the bomb some distance away from him. It exploded harmlessly, but sent a shower of small, apparently gold, coins into the air, which rained down over the mercenaries. Their attention was immediately distracted from Ezio and Yusuf as they hurried to pick up the coins, shouldering aside the civilians around who tried to join in.
“What was that?” asked Ezio in astonishment, as they continued on their way, now in no fear of molestation.
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